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University of Birmingham a Tale of the Merger Between the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise University of Birmingham A Tale of the Merger between the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise Tuck, Penelope; De Cogan, Dominic; Snape, John License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Tuck, P, De Cogan, D & Snape, J 2019, A Tale of the Merger between the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise. in P Harris & D De Cogan (eds), Studies in the History of Tax Law Volume 9. 1st edn, Studies in the History of Tax Law, Hart Publishing. <https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/studies-in-the-history-of-tax- law-volume-9-9781509924936/> Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: This is an author-produced version of the following chapter: Tuck et al (2019) A Tale of the Merger between the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise In. Harris & de Cogan (Eds.) Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 9. Published by Hart Publishing. The final published version can be accessed here: https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/studies-in-the-history-of-tax-law-volume-9-9781509924936/ General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 8 A Tale of the Merger between the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise Penelope Tuck, Dominic de Cogan and John Snape ABSTRACT The merger of HM Commissioners of Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise in 2005 stands out as one of the most instantly recognisable reforms of the UK civil service in recent times. A good deal has been written about the consequences of the merger, but we focus in this chapter on the period immediately before, culminating with the publication of the ‘O’Donnell Review’ and its recommendations that the old departments be merged and that key elements of the policymaking process be transferred to HM Treasury. We portray the merger as a collection of connected reform processes, embracing some although not all of the ideas for administrative change that were current in the early 2000s. The content of the reforms was not entirely revolutionary and shows strong continuity with previous and indeed subsequent initiatives. Yet the merger had a significance and scale that justifies its reputation as a landmark change in the UK tax system, as well as an ideological coherence as a belated application of market-inspired techniques to the tax authorities. INTRODUCTION A ‘major review’ was announced in July 2003 by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to examine the organisations which dealt with tax policy and administration: HM Customs & Excise (HMCE), HM Commissioners of Inland Revenue (IR) and HM Treasury (HMT).1 The Review was to be led by Gus O’Donnell, the then Permanent Secretary to HMT, and was intended to focus on the best organisational arrangements for achieving HM Government’s tax objectives. The UK, unlike most other tax administrations worldwide, had separate organisations dealing with direct taxes (IR) and indirect taxes and customs duties (HMCE). Both of these organisations had long histories, each with distinct cultures, modes of operation and workloads which had been built up over centuries. The findings of the O’Donnell Review were published in March 2004 and its recommendations that the IR and HMCE ought to be merged into a single tax department, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), with responsibility for policymaking partly transferred to HMT, were implemented promptly. A good deal of attention has been paid to the aftermath of these decisions,2 but there has been no systematic study of the period immediately preceding the publication of the report. In this chapter, for the first time, we present such a study. It is properly described as ‘history of tax law’ because it applies to relatively recent events similar types of examination as can be found in other parts of this volume, and in earlier volumes of Studies in the History 1 See HM Treasury Press Release 78/03, Chancellor Announces Major Review of Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise, July 2, 2003 (reprinted at [2003] Simon's Weekly Tax Intelligence 1202-1204). 2 See e.g. CJ Wales and CP Wales, Structures, Processes and Governance in Tax Policy-Making: An Initial Report (Oxford: Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, 2012); C Wales, ‘The making of tax policy in the post-O’Donnell world: can the HMT-HMRC “policy partnership” meet the challenge?' [2009] BTR 245; C Wales, ‘The implications of the O'Donnell Review for the making of tax policy in the UK’ [2004] BTR 543. We record our gratitude to the Chartered Institute of Taxation for funding the travel and transcription costs of the interviews discussed within this chapter, as well as for funding a witness seminar on the merger held at Birmingham Business School. 1 of Tax Law. The difference is that the raw material for many of those other studies is documentary, whereas much of the information that we wished to write about was not documented but is rather in the memories of the people involved.3 Although our objectives are orthodox for this series of books, our methods are not. In order to gain understanding of the ideas, techniques and arguments in play during the period immediately before the merger, two of the authors carried out a series of seven interviews with key informants from the IR and HMCE who were significantly involved in the processes leading up to the merger. The third contributed insights gained from close study of contemporary political, and policy- making, ideas. Together, the three authors also held a ‘witness seminar’ at Birmingham Business School on 12 December 2016,4 funded by the Chartered Institute of Taxation, at which other key informants from the IR, HMT and professional firms discussed a series of questions relating to the period before the merger. All the quotations used in this paper are drawn from the interviews that were conducted by the two authors mentioned above. We particularly focused in our interviews on the period before the merger and did not cover the aftermath of the merger. Most of the interviews took place in late 2016 and early 2017, with a final one being held in March 2018. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The interviews were coded for dominant themes which had arisen from the seminar but in addition codes were generated from the data itself. Our codes were focused on the perceived rival cultures of IR and C&E; on the so-called ‘Mapeley affair’, discussed below; on ministerial and other accountability issues; and on policy making (and ex ante scrutiny of policy and legislation more generally).5 In the final stage of the coding we sought relationships between the open codes and the themes until our categories emerged on the key aspects of the merger.6 This was carried out by all three authors separately and in discussion with each other. Our examination of this new evidence proceeds as follows. The next section of this chapter underscores the historical continuities of the merger processes by outlining some older developments in UK tax administration. This brief review demonstrates the sheer range of tasks performed by tax officials and the extreme difficulty of identifying any immutable set of functions for a revenue administration.7 We then focus more squarely on the period of the merger, looking broadly at the various reforms being discussed and implemented in the early 2000s and noting that the O’Donnell review only concerned a subset of these. The subsequent section examines some of the big ideas articulated by the New Labour administration following the 1997 election, and which lend a sense of coherence to the merger as well as to the otherwise disparate reforms to tax administration that took place outside the scope of the O’Donnell Review. We then concentrate more squarely on the merger itself, looking in turn at the motivations for the merger; the intended consequences; 3 This is the problem that has inspired ‘oral history’: see P Thompson and J Bornat, The voice of the past: oral history, 4th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2017); R Perks and A Thomson (eds.) The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Note that oral history has several well-known limitations including the reliance on memory, which may not always be accurate. Certain events have greater significance in memory than when they occurred, and may be shaped by memory in idiosyncratic ways when recalled.
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